The Once and Future Taps

The Once and Future TAPS: A Conversation with Harvey Young Harvey Young (bio) and Carla Neuss (bio) This interview was conducted in June 2023 at Yale University through the support and generosity of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, UCLA, and ATHE it has been edited for clarity and length. Carla Neuss (CN): To start us off I wanted to see if you'd like to reflect on your own experience with Theatre Journal. I know you just had an article come out? Harvey Young (HY): Yes, I've published a few times in Theatre Journal, but my first publication was a book review. I was the grad student representative back in the late [19]90s for ATHE's Research and Publications division. That group appoints, I believe, the editor for Theatre Journal and you get involved in a very loose way with negotiating the contracts with John Hopkins University Press. So, I was in the room. That was my first introduction to Theatre Journal back in the late [19]90s. My first publication was in 2004; it was around my last year as a grad student, or my first years as an assistant professor. Theatre Journal has always been a pillar of the field, in my mind. I've published a handful of book reviews, a couple of performance reviews, and a couple of articles in Theatre Journal. [End Page E-121] CN: How have you found the editorial process? Having talked with a few of our other colleagues, it seems like there's been an established process where even if you received a rejection, there's usually quite a lot of feedback. And when you are going through the editorial process, there's often quite a nurturing dynamic with the editor. HY: Like I said, my first experience with it was reviews. I feel bad not remembering who the book review and performance review editors were [then]. But they spent a lot of time with me. I had never written a performance review before. I'd never written a book review. They sat down and did line edits and all that type of stuff. Even to this day, I tell my graduate students that writing book reviews and performance reviews is a way of truly being introduced to the field of publication. And I remember back then I used to celebrate all those publications. A book review would come out and I [would] get a bottle of wine, and be like, "Hey, publishing is awesome!" I worked with Harry Elam for my first article in Theatre Journal, and that was great because it was just really deep feedback. That was on lynching. I've published two articles in Theatre Journal: one is on lynching, the other one is on whipping posts. Two things that aren't really theatre-based but are performance at their core. I had conversations in both cases [with the editors] where, for the whipping post piece, I spoke with Sean [Metzger]; for the lynching piece, I spoke with Harry [Elam]. And we had phone calls about [them]. There was also substantial feedback from the reader reports. So, it's been a really good experience. When I edited Theatre Survey, I remember I wanted to copy the model from Theatre Journal because it was focused on how you work with authors. How do you develop the piece and hopefully how do you get some of those pieces to win some awards? That's been impressive. CN: I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the discipline overall has grown and developed over the course of your career. HY: I've been around theatre for what, twenty-something years now? It's a little scary. As a graduate student in the [19]90s, it was really about the emergence of performance studies. And it was folks like Sean Metzger, Ramón Rivera-Servera, and Jen Parker-Starbuck; all of us were grad students. And we were like, "There's this new thing called 'performance studies'"—which wasn't all that new, but it was only a decade old in terms of scholarship. We were all convinced that there was this fundamental battle that was going

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